"When you meditate, don't send your mind outside. Don't fasten onto any knowledge at all. Whatever knowledge you've gained from books or teachers, don't bring it in to complicate things. Cut away all preoccupations, and then as you meditate let all your knowledge come from what's going on in the mind. When the mind is quiet, you'll know it for yourself. But you have to keep meditating a lot. When the time comes for things to develop, they'll develop on their own. Whatever you know, have it come from your own mind.http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/thai ... eleft.html

Don't worry, they won't let it be shut down for long. Else, people might start to realize how useless the majority of government is.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C. S. Lewis

Free healthcare and everyone not packing heat? How will our for-profit medical cabal make billions, yet deny cancer treatments to a young mother? ? How we will shoot each other over an argument over a parking space? Next thing you know you Aussies will make us import these lousy critters http://carlaspeaks.files.wordpress.com/ ... ngaroo.jpg

Kim, it's sad but true. The US has jumped the shark...just this week in Illinois, they announced a backlog of permit applications for concealed carry (handguns). That means thousands of people want permission to carry guns wherever they go. The US has completely lost its collective mind, and I'm thinking of exporting my children to Australia or Ireland just so they don't have to live in a country where people carry guns, waiting for an opportunity to start shooting. Crazy, crazy, crazy country, we are, in some ways.

Free healthcare and everyone not packing heat? How will our for-profit medical cabal make billions, yet deny cancer treatments to a young mother? ? How we will shoot each other over an argument over a parking space? Next thing you know you Aussies will make us import these lousy critters http://carlaspeaks.files.wordpress.com/ ... ngaroo.jpg

Kim, it's sad but true. The US has jumped the shark...just this week in Illinois, they announced a backlog of permit applications for concealed carry (handguns). That means thousands of people want permission to carry guns wherever they go. The US has completely lost its collective mind, and I'm thinking of exporting my children to Australia or Ireland just so they don't have to live in a country where people carry guns, waiting for an opportunity to start shooting. Crazy, crazy, crazy country, we are, in some ways.

Even so, you have wallabies running loose everywhere....

Hi, BuddhaSoup,You and your children would be very welcome here so come on over any time - no need to be scared of the wallabies. I have been thinking for years that most of the Americans I meet are nice but that American society and its political system are not. I don't know what went wrong but I'm sure the first step to fixing it is for Americans to see America as outsiders see it, because it's painfully obvious that the view from the inside is like the view from inside the asylum: it looks "normal".Good luck!

Sadly, what is being seen with this "shut down" are the paroxysms of racial fear as the country comes to grips with the inevitable browning of America. The "Tea Party," the "Birthers," those ossified old white male politicians who vowed to make Obama a one term president, those talking heads who insist that Obama does not share American values are all symptomatic of this fear -- a fear driven home by the fact that we now have an uppity black man White House. At great possibility of seriously damaging the US, the fearful ones strive for Obama's failure as if this will hold back the inevitable changes in culture this country is experiencing, moving from a white protestant majority to something quite different.

This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond.SN I, 38.

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireas na daoine.People live in one another’s shelter.

Kim OHara wrote:I have been thinking for years that most of the Americans I meet are nice but that American society and its political system are not. I don't know what went wrong but I'm sure the first step to fixing it is for Americans to see America as outsiders see it, because it's painfully obvious that the view from the inside is like the view from inside the asylum: it looks "normal".Good luck!

Living in America, I could ask you the same question SDC, Kim seems to be spot on........

18 years ago I made one of the most important decisions of my life and entered a local Cambodian Buddhist Temple as a temple boy and, for only 3 weeks, an actual Therevada Buddhist monk. I am not a scholar, great meditator, or authority on Buddhism, but Buddhism is something I love from the Bottom of my heart. It has taught me sobriety, morality, peace, and very importantly that my suffering is optional, and doesn't have to run my life. I hope to give back what little I can to the Buddhist community that has so generously given me so much, sincerely former monk John

Kim is spot on. And an example of that is the gun debate. I definitely don't want to have that debate, especialy in the context of DW. It's just to point out that you (the average american, I mean) are so deep in it that you don't realise that you're seen, by foreigners, as like being in a cult. And this applies to war, healthcare, education, barbarian capitalism, religious fundamentalism _ just to name the main ones.

He turns his mind away from those phenomena, and having done so, inclines his mind to the property of deathlessness: 'This is peace, this is exquisite — the resolution of all fabrications; the relinquishment of all acquisitions; the ending of craving; dispassion; cessation; Unbinding.' (Jhana Sutta - Thanissaro Bhikkhu translation)

Coming from Australia, one of the biggest problems I see in America, and in most Americans opinion one of the greatest things about America, is their 235 year old constitution and form of government, half the problems we have relate to the constitution and government no longer being relevent or appropriate to the modern age. For instance the constitutional right to bear arms, was the right to own single muzzle loading rifles or shotguns, not handguns with 20 clips, or semi automatic machine guns. The rules of congress and how congress decides the laws were all developed many years before the parlimentary governments many other countries have today, so it would seem a lot of the problems in the pre existing American system had the kinks worked out of them by countries that developed their laws and or constitutions later. Hence for people from these countries, the American government seems somewhat nonsensical and irrational, and for good reason, its 235 years out of date.......

18 years ago I made one of the most important decisions of my life and entered a local Cambodian Buddhist Temple as a temple boy and, for only 3 weeks, an actual Therevada Buddhist monk. I am not a scholar, great meditator, or authority on Buddhism, but Buddhism is something I love from the Bottom of my heart. It has taught me sobriety, morality, peace, and very importantly that my suffering is optional, and doesn't have to run my life. I hope to give back what little I can to the Buddhist community that has so generously given me so much, sincerely former monk John

You are the one that said we have an uppity black man in the White House, And yet you seem offended by our comments??

18 years ago I made one of the most important decisions of my life and entered a local Cambodian Buddhist Temple as a temple boy and, for only 3 weeks, an actual Therevada Buddhist monk. I am not a scholar, great meditator, or authority on Buddhism, but Buddhism is something I love from the Bottom of my heart. It has taught me sobriety, morality, peace, and very importantly that my suffering is optional, and doesn't have to run my life. I hope to give back what little I can to the Buddhist community that has so generously given me so much, sincerely former monk John

Obama is no more an uppity black man then Bill Clinton and George Bush were uppity white men, my experience is most "uppity" black men want very little to do with white men, which would seem just the opposite of our president.

18 years ago I made one of the most important decisions of my life and entered a local Cambodian Buddhist Temple as a temple boy and, for only 3 weeks, an actual Therevada Buddhist monk. I am not a scholar, great meditator, or authority on Buddhism, but Buddhism is something I love from the Bottom of my heart. It has taught me sobriety, morality, peace, and very importantly that my suffering is optional, and doesn't have to run my life. I hope to give back what little I can to the Buddhist community that has so generously given me so much, sincerely former monk John

lyndon taylor wrote:Obama is no more an uppity black man then Bill Clinton and George Bush were uppity white men, my experience is most "uppity" black men want very little to do with white men, which would seem just the opposite of our president.

Here you make my point. You may have been here for 45 years, but there is much you do not understand. I am not calling Obama an "uppity black man." I am simply pointing to an attitude that is usually expressed by the epithet "uppity ______" but since that is seriously less than polite, I will not say it. This attitude of what I am pointing to is often what is left unsaid by those who are expressing the unfortunate and inchoate racism and fear of change that is finding rather overt expression at present in our political landscape.

Last edited by tiltbillings on Sun Oct 06, 2013 4:22 am, edited 2 times in total.
Reason:inappropriate term removed, however it was made to describe how others might use that term, not this poster

This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond.SN I, 38.

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireas na daoine.People live in one another’s shelter.